Thrill of the kill: 90th anniversary of Leopold and Loeb's horrific murder of boy

Ninety years ago this week, Bobby Franks, 14, left school and headed for his parents' mansion in the Kenwood section of Chicago. His walk didn't take him home. Instead, it landed him in the history books, in the most hideous way.

Franks became the victim in a "crime of the century" case, a murder that shocked the public, even in the anything-goes Jazz Age. The unfortunate child crossed paths with two brainy-but-bad teenagers, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, at the moment they decided it would be fun to break the commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill."

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For them, murdering a young boy meant nothing. They did it to see what it would feel like, just for the thrill. "The killing was an experiment," Leopold would later tell his lawyer, Clarence Darrow. "It is just as easy to justify such a death as it is to justify an entomologist killing a beetle on a pin."

Such bloated ego seemed almost inevitable, given the boys' backgrounds. Born into wealth and privilege, both also had the gift of extraordinary intelligence. Leopold, born in 1904, the son of a man who made a fortune manufacturing boxes, had a genius-level IQ.

Lecturing on botany, writing scholarly tracts on ornithology (he was the nation's expert on the Kirtland warbler), learning new languages (he had already mastered 10), and translating classics filled his spare time.

Loeb, born in 1905, the son of a millionaire Sears, Roebuck executive, was way above average. He had a passion for reading, mostly crime fiction. By age 15, both boys were in college.

Bobby Franks, 14, was murdered.

Leopold had become obsessed with the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly the notion of a superman, who was not limited by little things like laws or morality. The pair began to dabble in petty crimes like tossing bricks through windows. Over time, their criminal activities escalated and their bond deepened into a sexual relationship.

They separated briefly in 1921, when Loeb transferred to the University of Michigan. At 17, he was the youngest graduate in the school's history.

By the fall of 1923, Loeb was back in Chicago and the wicked whiz kids were together again. They decided to act out Loeb's fantasy of committing the perfect crime, kidnapping for ransom. It took them all winter to plan it.

On May 21, 1924, the pair rented a car and stocked it with such essentials as a chisel, ropes and hydrochloric acid. Then they drove to a park near a local prep school to wait for the perfect victim. They had been trawling for a few hours when, around 5 p.m., Bobby Franks strolled into view.

Loeb, exploiting a mutual interest in tennis, lured Franks into the car by pretending that he wanted some advice about a racket.

The next morning, a man on his way to work found a boy's naked body, his face and genitals burned with acid, in a culvert in an isolated field outside of town.

Overnight and into the morning, the Franks family had received messages from a "George Johnson," both by phone and in a typewritten note that demanded $10,000 for the boy's return. Ransom became pointless by late afternoon, with the identification of Bobby's corpse.

Leopold and Loeb still might have gotten away with murder, had it not been for one small detail — a pair of tortoise-shell glasses with an unusual hinge found at the scene.

Detectives tracked the glasses to a Chicago optometrist, who had sold only three pairs. Leopold had one. Despite all the planning, he had made a single careless mistake, dropping his glasses from a pocket when he dragged the body into the culvert.

Leopold first insisted that he had lost them while birdwatching. But both teens quickly broke down under questioning.

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Leopold’s tortoise-shell glasses, left behind at the scene, helped solve the crime.

"Confession Bares Crime Plot of Amazing Depth, Cruelty," was the headline of the Chicago Daily Tribune on June 1, 1924.

They had offered nearly identical accounts of the murder, except for who did the killing. Each said it was the other.

As for motive, they said it was just for thrills, as one newspaper put it, a "laboratory test in emotion."

With their sons facing the hangman, the killers' rich families called in a legal luminary — Clarence Darrow, 66, famed for saving 100 defendants from execution.

"Not guilty," the original plea, would have put them before a jury, not a wise move with a pair of defendants as arrogant and unlikable as Leopold and Loeb.

Darrow, in a stunning move, changed the plea to guilty. Their case, with a parade of alienists, as psychiatrists were known in those days, would be presented to the judge, who would decide on life or death. In a three-day summation, Darrow quoted poetry, history and science in a plea for mercy so eloquent even the judge got misty-eyed. Darrow said that the boys, although not legally insane, were mentally ill and not responsible for their actions. "They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly."

Darrow ended up with two more notches on his saved-from-the-hangman's belt. The judge gave his clients life plus 99 years.

Richard Loeb would serve until 1936, when another inmate, outraged by his homosexual advances, stabbed him in the shower. His death prompted one of the most memorable opening lines in newspaper history: "Dickie Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition."

Nathan Leopold served 33 years and six months. After his parole in 1958, he moved to Puerto Rico. The one-time "superman" lived a quiet, ordinary life until his death from a heart attack in 1971.